The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man's Canyon

by S. S. Taylor

  She was looking tired, too.

  “There’s no wood down here,” Zander said. “And we don’t have the flamethrower anymore, so we don’t have any way of lighting a fire. Come on, guys. We just need to keep going. The river’s leading us somewhere. The treasure can’t be far away. And we need to find something for M.K.’s arm.” He was looking at us as though he couldn’t understand why we weren’t just following him. It was how he’d always been, stubborn, convinced he knew better than anyone else. I remembered suddenly a hike we’d taken when I was seven and he was eight. Dad had let us go by ourselves if we promised to stick to the trail, but Zander had almost immediately decided that it would be more fun to trailblaze. We’d been lost for a couple of hours but he’d gotten us out of the woods by following deer tracks back to a marshy little field near the trailhead. That was the problem; we usually did what Zander said because he was pretty good at getting out of tight spots. Not this time, though.

  “Zander,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, “we have no idea what’s up ahead. If we’re going to keep going, we’ve got to have some rest. We can sleep in shifts and the others can keep watch.”

  “He’s right,” Sukey told him. “I’m so tired and hungry, I can’t keep anything straight in my head.” She sat down on the ground, looking forlorn.

  It was so rare that Zander didn’t get his way that I’d forgotten how angry he could get.

  “Come on,” he demanded. “We can’t stay here. We have to keep going.”

  “I’m staying here,” I said. “We’ve got the sleeping bags. We have to rest.”

  “I’m with Kit,” Sukey said.

  “Me, too.” M.K. stared up at Zander, her serious little face fixed in determination. Zander was tough, but M.K., even in pain, was tougher.

  He scowled and zipped up his vest. “Fine,” he said. “But I’m going ahead to see what’s up there.”

  “Zander,” Sukey called after him, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. What if something…?” But he just ignored her and kept walking until he was out of sight. Poor Pucci looked back and forth between Zander and the three of us, unsure about what to do. Loyalty won out and he followed Zander. From the way Zander kept looking over his shoulder, I could tell that he thought we’d give in and follow him.

  We didn’t.

  “Is he always that stubborn?” Sukey asked once he had disappeared around a turn in the caverns.

  “Yes,” M.K. and I said at the same time.

  “Should we go after him?” Sukey looked worried now.

  “He’ll come back,” I told her. “He just hates it when we don’t agree with him.”

  “All right.” But she didn’t seem particularly relieved. “I’m not sure I could walk very far, anyway.”

  The sun must have been sinking fast outside the caverns because one by one the little star and moon shapes disappeared from the rock floor.

  “I was just thinking,” M.K. said. “Do you remember when Dad used to make pancakes for dinner?”

  “Those were the best pancakes.” I could almost taste them, warm and floury and filled with blueberries. “I would kill for one of those pancakes right now.”

  “Is Delilah a good cook?” M.K. asked Sukey dreamily. “What does she make?”

  Sukey laughed. “She’s an awful cook. But my grandmother… You should taste my grandmother’s food. In the summer, when I’m staying with her, we pick blackberries and she makes blackberry crumble, with vanilla ice cream on top. The blackberries get all sticky and on top there’s this brown sugar cake with a sort of crust on it. When it’s cooking the whole house smells like—”

  “Stop,” I groaned. “You’re torturing me.”

  She grinned. “Sorry.”

  “Sukey?” M.K. asked her after a minute. “Do you have a father?”

  Sukey picked up a little rock and pitched it into the water. “Of course. Everyone has a father.”

  “But who is he?” M.K. asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sukey said in a small voice. “Delilah won’t tell me.”

  “But—” M.K. started.

  “M.K.,” I warned.

  “No, it’s okay,” Sukey said. “I just wish I knew.”

  The last bit of light died away and we found ourselves in complete darkness again. I switched on my vest light and was glad to see that the faint brightness in the cavern had recharged the battery. M.K. and I got the reflective sleeping bags out of our vests and unfolded them. I gave one to Sukey and wrapped the other one around M.K. and me. We were warm enough, but I was starting to wonder about Zander.

  “He has the light on his vest,” I said, trying to reassure myself as much as I was trying to reassure them. “And he knows what he’s doing, even if he is stubborn.”

  But the truth was that I was worried, very worried, and every minute that went by that Zander didn’t return tightened the knot in my stomach.

  We sat there in silence, too tired to talk, and I was just about to say that maybe we should go and look for him when we saw, coming toward us in the darkness, a bobbing light: Zander’s light.

  He was running and when he reached us he stopped, breathing hard, and said, in a voice full of a fear I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard from him, “There’s something out there. Something big. A wolf or a cat. It was stalking me through the caverns. I could see its eyes shining in the dark.” He took another breath and as we looked at his wide, fearful eyes, Pucci came winging through the darkness and alighted on his shoulder. “Pucci scared it off, but it would have gotten me for sure.”

  Thirty-five

  “But what was it?” I asked him once he’d calmed down. “Did you actually see it?”

  “No. It was too dark. I could just see its eyes. I had the feeling that someone or something was following me but it wasn’t until the sun had gone down and it was completely dark that I saw the eyes. They were high up in the rocks on the side of the cavern, and from the way they moved I could tell it was a large animal, not the birds. It was stalking me, keeping its distance, and it ran off only because good old Pucci dive-bombed it about twenty times.” He ran a hand through his hair, and on his shoulder Pucci murmured worriedly.

  “Is it going to come after us?” M.K. asked.

  “Not if I can help it,” Sukey told her, taking out her pistol and making sure it was loaded. “Don’t you worry, M.K.” And she slid over and put an arm around M.K.’s shoulder, resting her hand on my arm. I held my breath for a minute so she wouldn’t take it off.

  “We’ve got to get some sleep,” I said as I breathed again.

  I waited for Zander to tell me I’d been right but instead he said, “We’ll sleep in shifts. Kit, you and Sukey first. M.K. and I will keep watch with the pistol. M.K. can nap if she wants. You need to rest, M.K. Then we’ll switch.”

  “I’ll stay up with you,” M.K. said weakly. “It’s only fair.”

  Sukey and I got into the sleeping bags. The rock was hard underneath our backs, but I was so tired that I fell asleep right away, and it didn’t seem like I’d been out very long when Zander was shaking me awake, saying, “Okay, our turn.”

  Next to me, Sukey stirred, too. “How long did we sleep?”

  “Four hours,” Zander said. “Something like that.”

  “Wow. It didn’t feel like four hours. How’s M.K.’s arm?”

  “No better,” he said grimly. I rubbed my eyes. They had adjusted to the low light and I felt a bit like a cat, able to see through the darkness. Sukey and I stretched and moved to the outside of the little circle we’d formed, letting Zander and M.K. lie down where we’d been sleeping. Zander gave Sukey back her pistol and gave me M.K.’s knife, telling me to wake him if we heard anything. It wasn’t long before we heard deep, even breathing from their direction and knew they were asleep.

  “Have your eyes adjusted?” Sukey whispered after a few minutes. Pucci was perched on my shoulder and he had curled himself up against my neck, his feathers tickling me every time he breathed. It was nic
e, feeling the warmth of him, the fast, even rhythm of his heartbeat.

  “Yeah, isn’t it strange? I can almost see down here.” With the fading illumination from my vest, I could just make out the outline of her face, her eyes, the contours of her cheekbones. The little lights in her ears had stopped flashing.

  “How do these work?” I reached out to touch one. The light felt more flexible than I’d imagined, almost like skin.

  “Solar batteries. I guess they’ve died, huh?”

  I nodded.

  She scrunched up her nose a little in a way that had started to be familiar to me.

  “I don’t like the dark. I don’t think I’d be a very good mole. What do you think we’ll find tomorrow?”

  I thought for a moment. “According to the map, we’re nearing the end of the first part of the tunnel or the canyon or whatever it is. I don’t think my Dad would have sent us on this journey if there wasn’t something at the end for us to find, but—”

  “But what?” Sukey had moved closer to me so she could hear, and now I could see her face even more plainly.

  “Well, a lot of things could have happened. As far as we can tell, he was here, what, twenty years ago, something like that? Maybe someone else found it in the meantime.”

  “But wouldn’t we have heard about it? I mean, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to announce they’d discovered a species of giant slug, or giant vultures?”

  “Maybe there was a lot of gold there and whoever found it decided to keep it a secret so BNDL couldn’t claim the treasure.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Your father.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry to bring this up, but… what did they tell you? About his disappearance?”

  “Nothing, really. They said they found an oar and some debris from the boats they were using near Bartoa. But I’ve done a lot of research on this. I’ve redone all the maps a hundred times. That can’t be right. They were way past there. They must have gotten it wrong. Why do you want to know?”

  “Oh, it’s just… something Delilah said when we heard about him. I’m not sure I should tell you.” She looked away and I felt a small knot start in my stomach.

  “Tell me.”

  “Okay, well, it was in the newspapers, you know. And Delilah was really upset when she saw the story. As I told you, she respected your father a lot. And she said, ‘Perished in the jungle, my foot! He no more perished in the jungle than I would! I bet BNDL had something to do with this.’ I asked her what she meant and she wouldn’t say anything more.”

  “Zander wants to go there, try to find out what happened,” I said. “Maybe we will someday. If we ever get out of here.”

  She was silent for a long moment and then she said, “The man who gave you the package. He didn’t have a tattoo, did he?”

  I was astonished. “How did you know?”

  “Never mind. What did it look like?”

  I pointed the light at the ground and drew an approximation of the symbol in the scanty dirt. “Like this,” I said. “Like a partial eclipse or something, two circles, one bigger than the other, overlapping. You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?”

  She studied it for a moment, leaning close to the ground. “My mother used to have this friend, Harry Mokwobay, Sir Harry Mokwobay, actually. He was Zimbabwean, a brilliant, brilliant Explorer who died on a polar expedition five or six years ago.”

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  “Yeah, well, he would stay with us whenever he was in New York, and one day he was changing his shirt or something and I saw that he had this tattoo on his shoulder. It was that symbol.”

  “Did you ever ask your mother what it meant?”

  “No. She was really broken up when he died. I think maybe she was in love with him. What did your guy look like?”

  I described him for her. “It’s awfully dangerous, being an Explorer,” I said.

  “More than it should be, I would say.”

  “That’s just what I was thinking.” I was quiet for a moment, deciding. “Sukey,” I said finally, in a voice barely louder than a whisper, “Raleigh said that he’d heard rumors about a secret organization, the Mapmakers’ Guild. They were supposed to be the ones who fed the wrong information into the Muller Machines. They were outlawed, but Raleigh said that there were rumors that they weren’t gone. I think maybe that tattoo was their sign. Have you ever heard anything about it?”

  There was a long silence. “Not directly,” she said. “But I always wondered about Harry. He was, well… there was something about him that made me think he had a lot of secrets, that’s all. And there’s a lot of stuff Delilah doesn’t tell me.”

  And then the light flickered once and finally gave out. We were in complete darkness. Sukey reached out and took my hand, something that surprised me more than the slugs and vultures combined. It was soft and her fingers laced with mine, fitting neatly into the spaces between them. The funny thing was that after a minute, it didn’t feel weird at all. She moved closer and leaned into me and I put my arm around her and sort of held her against me, the smoky, sweet smell of her hair in my nose. It seemed like a strange, grown-up thing to be doing, holding her like that. I could feel her breathing against me, the gentle rising and falling of her body. Pucci mumbled in his sleep. M.K. snored.

  We let the darkness sit around us. We were quiet for a long time, a good kind of quiet, and then the sun started rising outside, the little stars and moons and suns starting to glow pink, then orange, then yellow. Sukey and I watched the day arrive out there, in the real world, and it seemed so far from where we were that I couldn’t imagine we’d ever get there.

  Thirty-six

  We woke Zander and M.K. once the cavern was light again and got going as soon as we’d packed everything back into the vests and had some water to drink. It felt good to have had a little sleep, but we were even hungrier than we’d been the night before and we were now on the lookout for whatever it was that had been following Zander last night. I was still thinking about what Sukey had told me the night before, but I’d decided not to say anything to Zander and M.K.

  M.K. seemed a little better after sleeping, though her arm looked worse than ever, and we were quiet as the boat wound its way through the cavern. Now that we could see our surroundings better, we saw that we’d entered a magical section of the network of tunnels and caverns. There were huge stalactites and stalagmites everywhere we looked and the minerals in the water showed up pink and yellow and green in the strange, dappled light. I was lightheaded from hunger and I almost wondered if I was imagining it, but when I looked at the others, they were staring, too.

  We were so mesmerized by the formations in the caverns that we didn’t notice at first that the current was moving faster and that the light in the tunnel had increased, even though there didn’t seem to be any more of the holes drilled in the ceiling.

  “Hey,” I said all of a sudden, when the scenery had started passing by so quickly I couldn’t ignore it anymore, “the current’s really picked up.” I got the map out of my vest and checked it. “We should be coming around a bend in the river up here and then…”

  “And then what?” Zander asked nervously.

  “Hmm. That’s strange.” It was hard examining the map in the bottom of the boat.

  “Why’s the water moving so quickly?” Zander asked. “Wait. What’s strange?”

  “Well, I haven’t been able to look at the map in really good light since I put it together about the secret canyon, but the contour lines are… This is very strange.” I was trying to do the calculations in my head, but the lack of sleep and food was making me slow. “There’s some sort of big drop in elevation up here.”

  “Drop in elevation? What does that mean?” Sukey was sitting up now, holding her pistol.

  “It could mean some sort of geologic event that changed the shape of the caverns,” I said, still looking at the map, trying to figure it out.

  “Pucci, go
see what you can see,” Zander said, and Pucci rose into the air, his black feathers shimmering, his helmet of silver feathers pewter in the light, and disappeared into the cavern ahead.

  As we came around the bend, we were blinded by the bright sunlight coming in the open end of the cavern.

  “It’s the end,” I said. “But here is where it should…” I didn’t need to say drop because suddenly all we could see was sky, way out in front of us, and all we could hear was rushing water.

  “Waterfall! Waterfall!” Pucci cried out.

  “It’s a waterfall!” I shouted.

  “You think?” Sukey had to shout to be heard.

  “There’s no need to be sarcastic!” I shouted back.

  Sukey yelled, “What are we going to do?”

  “There’s nothing we can do,” I told them as the boat was swept closer and closer to the edge of the falls. “Hold on tight. Stay in the boat. It’s our only hope.”

  But M.K. was fiddling around with the buttons on the back of her vest.

  “M.K., stop that! Just hold on!” I screamed at her as we came closer and closer.

  “I’m just going to see what this one does,” she yelled over the noise of the water. “It’s the only one left.” I turned and watched as she poked at the back of her collar, just as I felt us being pulled into the center of the river.

  There was a loud whoosh and light blue fabric streamed out of the back of her vest, covering us in the boat and momentarily blinding us.

  “What are you doing?” I screamed at her. “We can’t see. We’re going over!”

  With a loud snapping sound, the fabric billowed and filled with air.

  It was a parachute, a huge parachute, blue as the sky.

  “There are two hooks on it!” Zander called out to us as the parachute jerked and M.K. started to lift off her seat in the bottom of the boat. “Hook them onto those rings on the boat!” We did as he said, hooking the long ropes dangling from the parachute onto the D rings on either side of the boat and felt ourselves lift off the surface of the churning water and into the air.

  We must have been 150 feet over the ground, out in front of the waterfall now in our strange airship, the inflatable boat hanging beneath the giant blue parachute and the four of us in it staring out with enormous, entirely surprised eyes. It was an incredible feeling, just hanging there in mid-air for a moment before we started to drop, and we sailed gently down, mist in our faces as we looked around at the incredible place where we’d arrived.